Video Game / Colony Ship (2023)

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Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game is a 2023 Science Fiction Role-Playing Game by Iron Tower Studio.

The game's setting is a Generation Ship headed towards Proxima Centauri. In its long voyage, the ship has become a very troubled place, as its inhabitants know they will live their entire lives without ever seeing Proxima Centauri, nor do they feel any connection to the (now long dead) people of Earth who built the ship in the first place. Factions have arisen, each with their own answers to the seeming pointlessness of their existence, and their infighting continues to threaten the ship's original mission to reach Proxima Centauri.

You are a struggling passenger trying to make their way in the ships lower deck's. One day, you get a job from one of your old colleagues and soon discover there's more to the ship than meets the eye.

The game is similar to Iron Tower Studio's previous game The Age of Decadence, both being turn-based computer role-playing games that allow you to play the game as you choose. You can barge into a situation shooting first then ask questions later, or you could take a diplomatic approach and avoid bloodshed.

The game was released in November 2023.

Tropes featured in Colony Ship include:

• A.K.A.-47: Many of the weapons resemble their real life counterparts but are named differently. Notably the Colt Classic (an M1911) along with the Grim Reaper revolver (the Mateba Model 6 Unica), and the Jackhammer shotgun (the Pancor Jackhammer).
• Absurdly Low Level Cap: The game works on a 1-10 skill and level system and the developers have implemented a soft cap of 10 for the game by the end of a playthrough.
• Action Girl: The player character if they go with a combat oriented character; Fayth one of the Pit party members with enough training along with the faction party members Cobra and Harbinger.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The cost of goods don't increase during the game but the amount of credits you can obtain is severely limited and the resale value of gear scavenged from dead opponents is only worth a tenth of their listed value. There is no way to increase the amount of money you get from selling items but there is a Feat that gives you a 25% discount.
• All for Nothing: The Return to Sender ending is this on a large scale. After arriving in orbit of Proxima the player fights the monks and sets the ship on a course back to earth. Sending the ship back on the journey that took hundreds of years. Although no one on the ship knows what is in store for them returning to earth, the player may have decided that landing on Proxima would yield a worse outcome.
  • In a sense the Promised Land ending is this for the player. Landing on Proxima B overrides any other ending the player has been working towards. The factions lifted up and brought down mean little in this ending as life on the ship abruptly ends. However this was the original mission of everyone on the ship so on a larger scale this could be seen as Earn Your Happy Ending from a certain point of view.
• Amphibian Assault: Frogs. Lest you be mistaken, the basic kind is an oversized and vicious ankle-biter. Then there's the one that spits blinding poison. And then there's the psychic one. Despite the apparent silliness, it's a result of unchecked evolution of what was originally a carefully selected and genetically modified keystone species intended to protect crops from pests without wandering off too far from the fields.
• Anti-Grinding: Every fight in the game is a set encounter along with limited avenues to gain valuable skill experience outside of your character level experience. And you can miss fights.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: One of the types of guns that you can find on board the ship are pepper-boxes, a technological ancestor to the revolver.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted, high armor against specific damage types will greatly reduce damage taken and this is especially true for certain enemies.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Energy weapons. Most enemies have weaker armor against energy damage and the weapons are higher quality than conventional weapons. However power cells are VERY limited on the ship. After 400 years no one has been able to manufacture more.
• Bounty Hunter: The player can take on three bounties from the Protectors. You can even receive an achievement for completing all three!
• Bulletproof Vest: All armor is a variant of this, with some straight up being called ballistic vests.
• Brain–Computer Interface: The Neural Link implant which increases intelligence.
• Cyborg: The player character and party members can get implants that improve stats or other benefits, even have them overclocked to improve the effects for an health debuff. Human enemies as well but there is another small society that reside in the ECLSS (Environmental Control and Life Support System) that are more like the Terminator than even a player character with all overclocked implants.
• Church Militant: The Church of the Elect is also called this. They are led by Chaplain-General Abraham and are preparing for war as much as the Brotherhood and the Protectors.
• Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: The game will even keep track of how often you resort to open combat, diplomacy and stealth! It's entirely possible to be a manipulator who never goes into open combat. Or a trigger-happy merc with a reputation for being a psychopath based on how much combat you've committed to.
• Deflector Shield: Man sized ones. Currently, the player can use three kinds: a vest that blocks all damage until its charge (HP) is used up and gadgets that either add to your total damage resistance until their HP is gone, or reflectors that reduce the accuracy of ranged attacks and shocking melee attackers.
• Dirty Cop: Braxton appears to be Da Chief in the Pit. However he's not above hiring mercs for a False Flag Operation in order to commit a coup against the de facto mayor.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Somewhat averted. All of the endings are bittersweet. However, the player character and their companions may find themselves in a much better position than when the game ended.
• Early Game Hell: Early on, your weapons are weak, you're often outnumbered, and you'll have limited access to grenades and consumables. Compounded if you're playing in Underdog mode, where you're explicitly told there will be fights you should back down from.
• Energy Weapons: Rare, best damage per shot for their weapon category but they burn through ammunition like a fire hose (all of them have a usage multiplier for ammunition, even the melee ones).
• Friendly Sniper: Evans is likely the first companion the player will have a chance to recruit. He wears his heart on his sleeve and has a strong sense of right and wrong. With some skill points in Rifles and Pistols it's entirely possible to spec him this way
• Future Imperfect: It appears that nobody on the Ship has a good grip on Earth history; it's further implied that this is by design, either due to the beliefs of the first generation of colonists, or due to it having been the case even before the launch. Earth is implied to have been a high-grade Crapsack World by then.
  • The description for the "M16" rifle demonstrates this very well, as it's definitely not a M16 to begin with (being much more futuristic looking) and is stated to have been used in the American Revolutionary War, suggesting the colonists somehow mixed up three rifles from three different eras.
• Generation Ships: The eponymous Starfarer is a retrofitted freighter designed to provide for the passengers during the centuries-long voyage.
• Impartial Purpose-Driven Faction: The Monks of Ecclesiastes, formerly life-support systems technicians who chose to become immortal, barely human cyborgs to maintain the Ship's life support in the wake of the Mutiny. Until they become a lot more hands-on to finish the mission.
• Jack of All Stats: When creating a character the player may take the heroic feat Gifted. This gives the player 3 more stat points and 4 more skill points.
  • Putting 10 points into constitution will allow the player to pick the heroic feat, Healing Factor. This will allow the player to install all 7 implants which, when overclocked can bring all attributes, except charisma, to at least average.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Energy weapons and their ammo are too rare to be used regularly so the times you can kill an enemy with an energy weapon before they burn through all their ammo are a treat indeed.
• Klingon Promotion: The First Sister in the Heart will offer the player her help her kill the Great Mother.
• Mecha: Come in the man-sized Anti-Riot Robots used to try to quell the Mutiny before the start of the game. You can even find one to repair and bring under your command during the game.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Prior to the game starting players can answer a few prompts regarding their character's backstory and their disposition towards factions.
• Multiple Endings: Four of them.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The more-or-less default one. The Ship has arrived, the Ship-Born are united at last (if by threat of getting their life support switched off), and the colonization will commence... in a generation or two. You may go to the surface with the forward team or stay back.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: You, if you choose the right ending, can just leave everything behind. Literally, by leaving the Ship in orbit and just taking the lander and possibly the rest of your party to the planet's surface.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: You can choose to make everything that happened so far futile. By turning the Ship around and sending it back to Earth, not knowing how long will it take, if there still be any Earth to return to, or even if the Ship will make it to the end at all.
  • Spanner in the Works: You can become this to whichever end-game faction you were working for. By forcing an immediate landing rather than following the plan. Everyone on the ship gets launched onto the planet. One particularly rude gesture from the ship-farer turns the first contact with the native species deadly.
• Mutants: A bunch! Not only are the animals grown in Hydroponics have become large and ferocious enough to attack humans, people exposed to radiation from the engine have over time mutated and even formed their own society in the ships engine called The Heart.
• Order Versus Chaos: Or order versus freedom. The major conflicts of the game revolve around these. Between Braxton and Jonas of the pit. On a larger scale there the Protectors and the Brotherhood. Although the player could always Take a Third Option with the Church.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: When choosing which faction to sell to, the player will receive one of these.
  • Knurl and Harbinger are mutually exclusive based on how the player completes Bounty Hunt.
• Psychic Powers: It's mostly coated in vaguely scientific terms such as "brainwaves disruption", but it's there. Also, chances are your first psychic opponent will be a literal frog.
  • When looking through logs about Proxima B there are theories that the natives may be psychic. The Promised land ending confirms this to be true.
• Putting on the Reich: The Protectors of the Mission. They're a heavily militarized and paranoid society. The propaganda posters that can be found in their territory are clearly based off of an infamous Nazi propaganda poster for the NSDStB. Their colors are red and black. And one of their slogans (The Mission Above All) sounds suspiciously similar to the English translation of "Deutschland Uber Alles". (For what it's worth, the other two Habitat faction are a theocracy and an implicit commie land.)
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The executive council is largely unseen in the game. But they are responsible for keeping the Brotherhood and Protectors in check. The player can be a Spanner in the Works against them or help them.
• Randomized Damage Attack: All weapons feature this, with damage fluctuating on every attack.
• Random Number God: All attacks, both for your party and for enemies, are percentage based, with three options for how they're generated:
  • Heavily Adjusted limits consecutive misses.
  • Lightly Adjusted makes results drawn like a deck of cards with every one being drawn before reshuffling the deck.
  • True Randomizer is as it says.
• Repressive, but Efficient: The Protectors of the Mission.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Besides ballistics ammunition and medkits, grenades are in limited supply with only around a dozen purchasable across the entire current game. Energy weapon ammunition can be purchased in small quantities as well.
• Sentry Gun: Come in two flavors; ballistic versions and energy weapon versions with deflector shields.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Most only have a range of 2-3 tiles, for reference melee weapons have a range of 1 tile and most pistols have a range of 4 or more tiles at least.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Jed and Matthias both start with levels in shotgun and armor which encourages them to fight up close.
• Shout-Out: The picture of the achievement Bounty Hunter has a picture of the iconic helmet worn by The Mandalorian.
• The Six Stats: The game has six stats: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, Intelligence and Charisma.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Like The Age of Decadence and Fallout 1 before it, the game has a system with skills and feats. You need fulfill certain requirements before you can take a particular feat.
• Sniper Pistol: Anyone with high enough Pistol skill, Perception and the right Feats count. Especially when using the Hauser 74 pistol (resembles a Mauser C96), which has a whopping effective range of 10 tiles. Only a few rifles have a range higher than that.
• Space Western: The Pit all the way down to the music evokes this genre.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: You can't take gear from party members and then dismiss them, they have a "minimum credit amount" worth of equipment they must have on them before they can be switched out. It scales from a few hundred credits worth of gear to along the line of 2,000+ credits.
• The Spock: The cyborg Monks of Ecclesiastes have an annoying tendency to spout probability data while speaking in robotic, emotionless voices. The friendlier ones tend to seem to be aware of it and vaguely amused by the effect it has on others.
• Subsystem Damage: With both melee and most ranged weapons you can aim at certain body parts in combat for specific debuffs on the enemy. The head staggers (stacking Evasion debuff), the arms reduce their accuracy, the legs reduce their evasion. This cuts both ways, so it pays to armor as much of your character's body as you can, too.
• Take Cover!: Many fights feature cover in the form of half and full. Standing next an enemy in cover reduces its effects by half.
• Trial by Combat: What little law there is in the Pit features the Courtroom where the player can become a prosecutor. The Courtroom is really a deadly arena where the defendant can be found not guilty by killing their prosecutor.
• Trick Bomb: Grenades that come in several varieties:
  • Stasis will freeze those caught in the effect for several turns and then debuff them on end of the duration.
  • Gas will cover a large area that will poison enemies and debuff their stats and will last for several turns.
  • Flashbangs will blind opponents in the area and reduce their evasion, to hit chance.
  • Disruptors will cause Panic, a debuff that causes damage over time and reduce reaction and AP.
  • Pulse will cause gadgets to shut down and will also stun enemies with implants as well as machines.
• Turn-Based Combat: Even the stealth sections! You have Action Points with moving costing 1AP per tile moved with attacks and item usage as well.
• 24-Hour Armor: All the gear you put on your characters is visible along with the enemies you'll face. You can get an idea how tough a fight will be by the gear someone wears.
• Too Awesome to Use: Romeo the robot. With computer and electronic skills the Player party can add a powerful robot to individual encounters. Unfortunately he has a limited power supply which is drained by each encounter. So players might find it sitting in the Maintenance Bay more often than not.
• Used Future: By the time your character enters the picture, it's been centuries since the ship initiated its voyage, and it shows. What was once the cargo hold is now a slum populated by those who want to escape the reign of the established factions, and those factions in turn have all but crippled the whole ship in their fighting.
• Utility Party Member: Faythe can be recruited while doing the second mission at Earl's. She can take the trait Thief which increases her stealth skill gain and already has skill points in all her science skills.
• Wretched Hive: The Pit.
  • The Brotherhood's Habitat could qualify as well. With corrupt police and the least resourced Habitat of the three major factions.